Georgia Rising : The Battle Between Pride & Policy

From the author of Staten Island: Like It or Not! (2019), Lorenzo Lucchesi:As the progeny of the "Cotton Kingdom" slowly faded into history and the sweeping societal and economic changes caressed the landscape from the Piedmont region to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Eternal Flame of the Confederacy flickered dimly once more in Georgia. Only, this time, as the Great Depression & World War II came to a close, it did so surrounded by an onslaught of transformations that changed things forever. As the production of chenille gave way to the beginnings of the contemporary carpet and textile industries in Dalton-Whitfield, the poultry sector revolutionized Gainesville-Hall County, and Northeastern and Midwestern transplants flooded the Metropolitan core's suburban outskirts, Georgia's northern communities each wrestled with establishing their modern identities. Concurrently, the beloved capital city of Atlanta - inundated with some of the state's most studied characters, including William B. Hartsfield, Ivan Allen, Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, Lester Maddox, Mills B. Lane, Bert Lance, Sam Massell, and others - came to face to face with the challenges the commencement of a new era brought.From the epoch of the glamor and romanticism of novelists Margaret Mitchell & Edna Lee captured in the zeitgeist projected by the Loew's Grand Theatre to the legends and tales abounding in the small railroad towns of the bittersweet days in the aftermath of the "recent unpleasantness," the literary spirit of Georgia's oral tradition fades gradually with each passing day and with each succeeding breath. For, somewhere, in the dark shadows on an overcast, humid day in the Georgia countryside, an old man or woman sitting on their veranda thinks back to everything that happened with a sigh of fond recollection. Marked by such unprecedented shifts from ~1945 to the present, the story of Georgia is one that cannot be encapsulated by any one generalization or statement. "Georgia Rising," thus, is a compilation of research and interviews with several-hundred of the state's most prominent legislators, statesmen, lobbyists, urban planners, longtime residents, and historians (and their families) that chronicles the reminiscences of a populace that has been left to reassemble its thoughts and memories of a distant past.Told through the perspective of the individuals who participated in the debates on the floors of the state House & Senate, those who experienced history at the very forefront, and the last remaining storytellers of their respective generations, "Georgia Rising" provides a localized insight into the history of the pertinent communities with detailed anecdotes of all the triumphs, defeats, tragedies, and memories in between. Read more